


Shards

by Amalspach



Category: The Folk of the Air - Holly Black
Genre: Emotionally Repressed, I Don't Even Know, I need sleep, Oneshot, do not think I spelled that write, people have some baggage am I right, props to me for another terrible pun under the belt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-05 11:18:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16366886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amalspach/pseuds/Amalspach
Summary: An examination of Cardan's thoughts on Jude and why he doesn't hate her. Not at all. Oneshot, drabble.





	Shards

**Author's Note:**

> Just finished reading the book The Cruel Prince again (really, it's incredible, please give it a try) and thought I'd do this little drabble. I had some things to say. Also, haha, this was supposed to be a post for Halloween but I was too busy escorting small children to submit it and to be honest it slipped my mind until tonight. I've had a lot of stuff to take care of. 
> 
> Anyways, this was hastily done, but there's less than nothing written for this fandom on AO3, so. I mean, anything's still an improvement from level zero. Here's this and have a good night!

"You really do want me," she says, close enough to kill. Close enough to touch, and that invasive thought was all the more terrible. "And you  _hate_ it." 

And more than anything else, that will haunt him. For as much as there is to hate about Jude, there is always more to want, always more to  _take_. Cardan is in a state of perpetual misery, and this is nothing new. He squanders days sipping the darkest of wines and producing the cruelest of games, carving new pains into everyone around him. If he cannot experience happiness, he will overturn the world's instead, robbing it blind and spoiling it like cream turned sour. There is a small amount of satisfaction found in carefully lashing out at everyone, dolling out misfortune in equal measures. This is, perhaps, why faerie revelry is so intoxicating; it is beauty and splendor designed to mask manipulation, deception, and bloodshed. Mortals so rarely see the pratfalls coming, and it's so delightful to lure them into a stage of wonderment before locking the doors to the kingdom shut. If the immortals have to be what they are, miserable and conniving, they may as well take the free down with them. It's so much better than stewing. 

And Cardan enjoys the thrill of the chase as much as the rest of them. He just doesn't enjoy the end of the line so much, the point at which you cut your losses and begin the fantastical torture. Blood is not his token. Mental warfare is enough to stave boredom, and once he has crushed someone, destroyed their hopes and demolished their dreams, the game is done. There is no lingering resentment, only emptiness. Unlike the rest of his kind, the joke is complete, and there is a victor and a loser. He can move on in the satisfaction that another player has been beaten. 

Then there was Jude, who never decided to break. She rose to meet his taunts instead of buckling beneath them, and she chose to stand on her own two feet despite his reputation for disaster. She is mortal, and yet she was  _more_. And the moreness of her leaked through, little by little, and one day he realized he couldn't look away. Jude, even though she possessed the cripple that was humanity, had somehow ensnared his attention. She had ascended the game entirely, left him groveling for the chance to taunt and pester her, to chase after her attention. Pathetic as it was, for once the tides had turned. 

Cardan truly hated her. He hated that she had both the luxuries of a fae and the love of some, siblings she trusted and would willingly die for. She had a father that would not abandon her, who instead had made her a fierce warrior fit to fight. She knew nearly every answer to the questions asked in classes and she never stepped away from a challenge. He hated that she was not supposed to be special, and yet in some inexplicable, clandestine way, she had become integral to faerie. As ornery as ever, as essential and perceptively unnoticed as a heart. 

He also hated that she had kindness, that the world had not snuffed it out of her yet. She smiled at her sisters, even when they did something foolish or retched, and even if they were furious with eachother there was room for some small compassion, internal though it may be. He bitterly wished that perhaps she could smile at him that way, just for a moment, just so he'd know what it felt like to be on the other side of that grin. To be looked at like he was a part of her world, a place that knew such things as blind and flexible loyalty, earned trust, and affection. Jude was clever, and strong, and impossible not to like. Even her fear was coated in steel; the things that terrified her were vast and frightening, but she remained herself, remained able to persevere. She did not go gentle into the dark. She raged for all she was worth. 

Worst of all, he hated that he could not help but notice Jude. He sorely missed her clever tongue, her combative actions. Her eyes were always clear, weren't they, and made of metal. He thought about her skin, warm and foreign, and her scent, always changing, not like the aromas of fresh dew or crackled pine needles that always belonged to the fae. He found his mind lingering on the exact brown of her hair, like liquid sunshine and poured chestnut, and wondered what she would taste like. She was a constant pestilence in the back of his skull, tantalizing insufferable, and he could not seem to shake her. Sometimes he hated how much he wanted her, so much he could scarcely breathe.  _You really do want me_ , she had told him, and it pains him that she's  _right_ , irredeemably, horribly  _right._  

Cardan doesn't want to admit that he needs for things. That is not befitting of a shunned prince, is it? Needing things is a sign of weakness. It means you require more than you are, and that's like accepting defeat. He's been kicked all his life, and this is not one of his games. This is not an operatic stage where there is one victor and one loser. This could mean death or life, and to an immortal, the price is steep. Needs are forbidden. 

And yet, he requires what he was never given. He wants for trust, an impossible boon in faerie, and for company. True company, besides what his loathsome companions could provide, though he supposes he does care for them in some insignificant way. He needs the good sort of company, the easy kind, where two people are just comfortable being around eachother. He needs another mind to pick, a mind apart from his cruel trickery, a brain he can think with that will not judge him so harshly for all his crimes. He really just requires someone who will stay, who will remain loyal without blackmail or subterfuge. Someone he can know enough of to love. 

Secretly, he wants that someone to be Jude. He doesn't say it - it really is too painful and shameful a truth to ever utter aloud - but she is the most genuinely brazen an individual he's ever met. She is strange and angry and incredibly unapologetic about all of it. She wears everything on her sleeve, though she's an incredible actress when she needs to be. 

He almost thinks she is starting to see more of him. He almost believes she can grow to find him both infuriating and worthy. 

And then she puts a crown upon his head, dashing everything to pieces, impaling him with shards of a lost future. How foolish to think he could escape, that life could be anything but the abject terror of the past. 

This is why you shouldn't trust anyone, especially mortals. They've all got such short lifespans, and sooner or later one will waste theirs trying to get back at the eternal. Lashing out, just like he used to do. 

He just didn't expect it to hurt so damn much. 

* * *

 

He wants to kill her. Cardan often wants to hurt her, to pain her like he is pained, but so rarely does he actually want to toy with permanency. Rarely does he want her gone for good. 

In fact, maybe this is the first time he's ever seriously hated Jude. Maybe all that resentment was barely hate at all. A little too late for that now, though. 

The king moves through the court with the grace of a seasoned politician, drinking in the swell of bodies and the shine of the moondust with an almost religious fervor. Cardan is very skilled at playing pretend; surely no one notices the way he clutches his tinted glass too tightly and laughs far too emptily. He listens to all of it, all of the things he despises about the gentry compounded into a splitting nightmare, and he bears it, because what else is there to do? There is no rest for the wicked, and he is certainly not the hero. 

He listens to Nicasia as she whispers promises into his ear. He knows better; they are hollow things, dedicated to a crown rather than the person beneath it. Still, it jabs him beneath the ribs. She was exactly the kind of fae he should love; she is beautiful, cunning, powerful. Nicasia is the embodiment of their race, and he loved her. Perhaps he always will; looking at her continues to make him mourn their time together, however false. She is terrible, but she is his friend. He may never stop caring. But she will keep toying with him if she thinks Cardan is of use, regardless of whatever personal connection they might or might not share, and he cares little for games when they are not his own. So he smiles and sends her on her merry way, thinking she has accomplished something. 

It occurs to him that perhaps he has a type. It's always the fearless, intoxicating, horrifying women that end up besting him. Hopefully this is a trend that will not continue after he eventually gets Nicasia off his back and he is able to crush Jude's windpipe and bash in her skull. 

When she finally has the decency to show up and deign him with her presence again, Cardan coats his very essence in sugary sweetness. He knows, for a fact, that it is more off-putting than any glaring threat. He straightens up, wears his ruff of feathers proudly, and basks in her coldness, in the way she guards herself around him. To be honest, that is easier to see than all her mighty defiance. It hurts less to deal with.  _Perhaps she also feels remorse_ , he thinks lowly, and he wants to murder his own thoughts, silence them forever. 

Suddenly, the bitterness rushes back, as if in protest to the civil war brewing in his mind. Anger, at least, he can manage. 

And then, he stands up, gestures to the throne, the greatest object of desperation and despicable action in his world. It would be better set on fire, ashes scattered to the winds. As if sensing the hostility, the bright blooms darkened and hardened, sharpening to barbed thorns. 

"This is what you wanted, isn't it?" he asks. "What you sacrificed everything for. Go on. It's all yours." The horror and repulsion on her face is all too evident, as if the brunette were seeing her own dismal life played out in tarot cards and was all too scared of the answers they provided. 

"It's not mine to take," she eventually answers, trying to regain composure. But now he has seen beneath her cracks again, into all the hard opinions and moral conundrums; there is no hiding anymore. "I didn't want this." 

"As if that stopped you," he tells her lowly, voice brimming with terrible regret. There is more hurt than he would like to reveal. "Sit, anyhow. See what you've done." Her eyes gleam with a stab of murder and something almost akin to sorrow. 

Slowly, she trods to where he stands, each step leaden. As she eases into the chair, utterly human, she lays her arms flat across the barbs, not wincing at the piercing tips. She is visibly uncomfortable, she does not like it, but some small part of him thinks that she has never looked more in command. Even as a mortal, even with spite lining her words, she is more a leader and more a queen than he is. If she was an immortal, Jude would take all of faerie by storm. 

It is in that moment that Cardan realizes that he does not want her dead, not even now. He wishes, still, that she would have chosen him, would have considered him, would not have crushed his fragile trust like Nicasia. He still wants her, too, despite everything she is putting him through. 

He wants to rip her to pieces, sure. He wants to suck the life from her marrow and expose her to the world: this is Jude at her worst, at her most definitively ugly, at her most raw and horrific. He wants to ruin her, starting by exploiting his position as king to rip her plot into pieces. 

(But he never will, and that's the problem, isn't it? 

You can commit as many atrocities as you like, but you don't ruin the people you love. 

So he will love her so hard that it burns, and he will remind himself that love is stupid. He will never be the hero - it's too late, now - but he won't play the monster yet. At least, he won't be the monster that kills her.)

* * *

 

Yes, he loves her. He wishes that he didn't. As she sits in his throne, sun glinting in her hair and lighting her skin, not hate-able in the slightest, he knows it to be true. 

He loves her, and he hates  _himself_ for it. 

Too late to change anything, now. 


End file.
